This doesn't strike me as cognitive dissonance. From the government's perspective, Snowden didn't reveal illegal activity and so is not a whistleblower.
At what point does he cease being a whistle blower?
Still better than a full dump à la WkiLeaks, but the big question is whether the journalists have the OpSec skills to avoid leaking the documents to other governments.
It doesn't matter if it was directly or through an intermediary, everything that Snowden gave to journalists, Snowden leaked to the public.
Why not just leak documents related to that one issue? If he had, I would not hesitate in the least to call him a whistle blower, and in fact I think he'd be living as a free man right now if that were the case.
Second, we don't know the number of potential documents, nor how they may have been divided among those to whom they were disseminated.
Addressing the first point, it should take work and review, on an ongoing basis, to re-affirm the classification of that material. By default there should be a /reasonable/ and /short/ expiration time. If it costs too much to keep those secrets than that in and of it's self is a reason for not HAVING so many secrets to keep!
The cost, otherwise, is to our freedoms; to the very liberty for which our government is supposed to be protecting.
Perhaps you believe in your country right or wrong, but many don't nowadays, many feel little allegiance to national boundaries or national agencies which actively undermine our society.
What I find most interesting here is that this attempt by security agencies to collect it all actually means that their operation can be compromised by the smallest cogs in their machine whom they foolishly gave full access to. You can be absolutely sure that if Snowden walked out with this data, Chinese, Russian and other spies have the whole trove as well dating back years, because their security around private contractors was awful - GCHQ shared all this with the US without restraint, and of course all their data is now open to the world. So the ambition to collect it all and the entire collection of data (including data on western judges, politicans etc etc) is actually highly damaging to national security, even if you believe that flimsy excuse.
At some point if you're exposed to all this you might feel you have to take sides with humanity and take a stand, before these tools are used for widespread repression. At that point you start being a whistleblower, and your life will probably be destroyed by the powers that be (as his has been, or as Binney's was), because they now have that power.
http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000001733041/the-pro...
I think the biggest lesson from Snowden is not technical, but the simple argument that the power of state and citizen must be in balance for society to function, and we must constantly guard against the state aggrandising power, because that is in its nature.
"or threat to public interest"
It doesn't have to be illegal.